Hello! So instead of a regular comic today, you get 5 bad ones! This is pretty much inspired by the “200 Bad Comics Challenge” as first issued by Box Brown to Nedroid, and later picked up by ChannelAte and DJ Bogtrotter. I think. Anyway, I don’t really have plans to make 200 of these anytime soon, but bursts of 5 should appear with irregular intervals from now on. Oh, and you can click on the image to make it bigger. Also, while I’m still on “vacation”, other new stuff may appear later this week and/or next week. Who knows, stay tuned!

If you’re a bit like me, antisocial and introverted, then you probably enjoy all these new ways to “connect” and “interact” with people online, especially since they don’t require you to leave the house. And of course, Optipess is present on some of these with varying intensity! So in case you didn’t know of these already, or if you’re a new reader, I figured I should pimp out the links:

Most notably there’s a brand new Facebook page for Optipess. This replaces the old group thing on there, the biggest difference being that this one will actually be updated! At the very least I’m running a magical RSS import script that notifies you of every new strip (when it works as advertised, I should note), but there’s also a chance other news and semi-important messages will appear here. And maybe later some exclusive comics? Who knows!

Also, even less formal and basically bordering on the completely mundane, I’m also on the micro-blogging sensation site “Twitter” which you may have heard of already. Here I will inform you of what I just ate for breakfast or the current color of my socks. Oh, and the existence of new comic strips will also be tweeted about along with other comic-related events. Such as my excitement if I discover a new Photoshop shortcut key, for example. Thrilling!

PS: In addition to these, I’m also present on other more or less “social” music sites such as Last.fm and RateYourMusic, which may or may not be of interest, probably depending on how good your taste in music is.

Ouch, looks like today’s comic strip will be delayed a little while as I pretty much spent all day yesterday in bed groaning with headaches and/or sleeping instead of drawing. Hopefully it will only be a few hours late, however that’s now dependable on whether or not I manage to stay awake for more than 15 minutes. Stay tuned!

Well, I just had to blog about this: Apparently today, the first Monday in February, is in fact “National Sick Day” – the one day per year when the most employees call in sick for no good reason. Now, I had no knowledge of this day when I made today’s comic, so this definitely chalks up as a really weird coincidence! You can read more about the phenomenon here.

And to make matters even more uncanny, I seriously contemplated calling in sick to work today – as I felt pretty awful – but decided against it when I realized that I always do. Well, I guess that’s not really uncanny, just… sad.

Anyway, I hope you found this amusing as well, whether you’re at work or at home wrapped under a blanket watching Oprah reruns.

So instead of a new comic this past Monday, I figured I should post a finished version of the “25 Expressions Challenge”. If you’re following me on Twitter, you might have seen a work-in-progress version a few months back, but today I decided to ink and color it for your viewing pleasure. But what is it, I hear you ask? Well, basically it’s an exercise for comic creators in conveying facial expressions of their characters. I basically only have one character anyway, the nerdy glasses-wearing guy, so I quickly gave it a shot. Behold:

Hopefully most of these get the intended emotion across, and if they don’t – my excuse is that I pretty much had to look up a few of these words in a dictionary. Either way, a fun wholesome game for the entire family can be played if you cover the words below each image and try to guess the correct description based on the drawing. So gather your parents and grandparents for some festive fun cramped together on the couch! Once completed, you can go right back into your regular Christmas schedule of fighting and screaming. Oh, and if you’re a comic creator yourself, or even if you’re not, an empty template to doodle on is located here.

Also, with some luck there should be a new comic strip later this week, but unfortunately I seem to have caught some sort of nasty cold. Basically I feel most like the expression in the lower right corner at the moment (lower left corner is how I’d like to feel), so I guess we’ll have to see if I feel up to some drawing later.